Rite of Passage

“Can I take a look?” I asked.

Ralph shrugged. “All right, I guess.”

It was a clothing store, and most of the clothes looked very strange to me. There were even some items I couldn’t figure out.

After a minute, the man who ran the place came up to Ralph and said in a loud whisper, “What’s he dressed like that for?”

“She’s a girl,” Helga said. “And she doesn’t know any better.”

My ears went red, but I pretended I didn’t hear and just kept poking through the rack of cloaks I was looking at.

“She’s down from that Ship,” Ralph said in a whisper as good as a shout. “They don’t wear clothes up there. She probably thought that junk she has on is what we wear.”

The man sneered and quite deliberately turned away from me. I wasn’t sure why and I was puzzled, because it was obviously meant to be offensive. He only stopped short of spitting on the floor at my feet. It seemed excessive if it was only because I didn’t have the sense to dress like a proper girl in the horrible things he had to sell.

As we went out, the storekeeper muttered something about “grabbie” that I didn’t catch. Ralph and Helga didn’t seem to notice, or pretended they didn’t, and I said nothing.

We had just left the store and turned the corner, starting on a long downhill slope, when I stopped still and said, “What’s that?”

“What?”

I pointed at the dead gray mass tipped with white that stretched across the bottom of the street, blocks away downhill. “Is that water?”

They looked at each other, and then in an “any blockhead should know that much” tone of voice, Ralph said, “It’s the ocean.”

I’d always wanted to see an ocean, since they’re even rarer on the Ship than stores. “Could I take a look?”

“Sure,” Ralph said. “Why not?”

First there was a stone wharf and warehouses stretching away on either hand. The harbor stretched two great arms around to enclose a large expanse of water. At the sides were wooden docks on pilings ru

Even in the harbor, the water ran in white-crested peaks and slapped noisily at the stone and wood. There were birds of white, and gray, and brown, and black, and mixtures of all these colors, all wheeling around and crying overhead, and some of them diving down at the water. The air down here smelled strongly — of fish, I think. Outside the harbor the water was ru

I might have made comments about all the things I saw, the odors, the men working, but I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t strike Ralph and Helga as amusing, and by that time I was starting to be a little cautious about exposing myself. I was seeing them as something less than the allies they had been when we were ru

He pointed down at a little craft tied alongside. It was about twelve feet long, with a mast that stood up high enough to reach above the dock. It had a boom that was lashed in place. It was painted a serviceable white with black trim, and had the odd name Guacamole painted on it.

“What do you think of her?” he asked.

“It’s a very nice ship,” I said.

“It isn’t a ship. It’s a boat, a sailing dinghy, and it’s ours, Helga’s and mine. We go sailing all the time. Want to go for a sail?”

Helga looked at him, obviously pleased. “Oh, can we?”

“If she’ll go,” Ralph said. “It’s up to her. Otherwise we’ve got to do what Daddy said and stay with her.”

“Oh, do come on,” Helga said to me.

I looked at the water and tried to make up my mind. The water looked rough and the boat looked small. I really didn’t want to go at all.

Helga said, “We’ll just stay inside the harbor.”

“It isn’t dangerous,” Ralph added, looking at me.

I didn’t want him to think I was scared, so after a minute I shrugged and started down the wooden ladder that reached from the dock down to the rear of the boat. The ladder stood about two feet above the dock at its highest point, and I grabbed it and backed down. I seemed to be seeing more of ladders lately than I really cared to. Ralph and Helga started down after me.

The boat was rising and falling on the water as the swells came in to break on the docks and the quay. I waited until the boat was rising and then stepped in. I almost slipped, but I held my feet and then moved carefully to the front, grabbing on when I had to. When I got by the mast, I sat down on the seat that ran across the front. Helga dropped into the boat as I was sitting, and Ralph was right behind her.

I blinked a little as a trace of spray wet my cheek. “Aren’t we going to get wet?” I asked.

They didn’t hear, and I repeated my question in a louder voice.

“It’s just spindrift,” Helga said. “You’ve got to expect that. We won’t get too wet.”

Ralph said, “Besides, the water will get you clear. I know you don’t see much water in your Ship.”

That was another thing that irritated me about Ralph and Helga. They had all sorts of misconceptions about the Ship which they insisted on trotting out. Ralph was worse, because he was dogmatic. I thought at first he was being malicious until I realized he actually believed what he was saying, like that bit about going naked — that wasn’t completely wrong; some people do go without clothes in the privacy of their own apartments, but I would like to see somebody trying to play soccer while completely bare. The point is that what he said wasn’t quite right, either, and he wouldn’t listen. He would just say his misconceptions flatly and expect you to agree with him.

Right at the begi

Helga was a little more bearable because she only asked questions.

“Is it true you don’t eat food on your Ship?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they say you don’t grow food like we do, that you eat dirt or something.”

“No,” I said.

And: “Is it true that you kill babies who are born looking wrong?”

“Do you?”

“Well, no. But everybody says you do.”

The thing that really a

Ralph and Helga got the sail up in short order, while I watched, and then Helga came up by me, untied the bow, and sat down. Ralph untied the stern and we pushed off. He had a little stick tiller to steer with and held the boom by a line. He put the boom over and the breeze filled the sail with an audible flap.

We started from the right-hand curve of the harbor with the wind behind us, and sailed across the long width of the harbor. The chop of the waves and the spray were a